Trump Announces Fake News Awards Winners

The US president announced his top-ten list which includes his regular targets CNN, The New York Times and The Washington Post using his preferred medium of Twitter

US President Donald Trump has kept his promise by announcing the winners of his much touted "Fake News Awards".

Trump unveiled the winners late Wednesday, hours after a maverick senator from the president’s own Republican party accused him of employing Stalinist language to “slur” and undermine the free press.

Arizona lawmaker Jeff Flake levelled the broadside in an address from the Senate floor earlier in the day, delivering a one-two punch after veteran Republican John McCain penned an op-ed assailing Trump’s spoof awards.

The president announced his top-ten list — which included his regular targets CNN, The New York Times and The Washington Post — using his preferred medium of Twitter, linking to a list published on the Republican Party’s website that crashed minutes after his big reveal.

Flake slammed what he called the president’s dangerous disregard for the truth, and his designation of the mainstream news media as an “enemy of the people.”

At loggerheads with much of the US news media since his election, Trump finally doled out his “Fake News Awards” after weeks of speculation, recognizing what he had called “the most corrupt & biased of the Mainstream Media.”

Nobel-prize winning economist Paul Krugman, who writes a regular opinion column — not news articles — for The New York Times, nabbed the number one spot.

The administration said he merited the award for writing “on the day of President Trump’s historic, landslide victory that the economy would never recover.”

The list also pointed to an error from ABC’s veteran reporter Brian Ross, who was suspended for four weeks without pay after he was forced to correct a bombshell report on ex-Trump aide Michael Flynn.

In follow-up tweets to his “Fake News” announcement, the commander-in-chief posted that “despite some very corrupt and dishonest media coverage, there are many great reporters I respect and lots of GOOD NEWS for the American people to be proud of!”

“Together there is nothing we can’t overcome — even a very biased media. We ARE Making America Great Again!”